Monday, September 22, 2014

I wrote this earlier this year after some intergenerational political conversations with folks who were involved in feminist movements in the 70s and 80s, but it seems urgent now more than ever with the election results:

At a time when ecologies are on the brink of collapse and more attacks are planned on the soil and the sea, poisoning and polluting the planet; when structural violence means poverty for the many and filthy affluence for a few; when the white supremacist capitalist settler colonial heteropatriarchy sustains structures of power, control and sanctioned abuse including incarceration and murder; when non-human animals are exploited, murdered and tortured on an industrial scale; when everything and everyone that matters are under constant attack - we need to be doing everything we can to strategise to end this shit and build something better.

I know a lot of people on the left put their hopes and faith in the parliamentary process via elections and encouraging people to vote, doing campaign trails etc. And this failed to change the government. I don't need to tell anyone that the next three years is gonna hit people hard, the violence against most people who are not rich white men will continue.

This failure should not lead to a sense of defeat. Like classic neoliberal speak, this is also an "opportunity" to rethink our strategies of struggle. I think there really needs to be a shift away from parliamentary politics and towards more grassroots organising, to build alternatives to really challenge the system at the root and lessen dependency on the colonial settler state on a material level. We need new strategies and to be bold and imaginative as to what we can achieve and do.

I think part of the strategy is for those of us who care about justice and equality to come together - learn from each other - from all our mistakes and successes - and work together. I think there are two types of gaps/divisions that need to be bridged to organise effectively from the grassroots: between movements and between generations. We can't build a mass movement for meaningful social change in our small scattered groups. What we need to build on firstly is our relationships and connections between social movements and have intergenerational dialogues. Sharing of knowledge, strategies, tactics and resources can only strengthen all our 'causes' which essentially have similar roots causes in the naturalisation of social hierarchy and the maximisation of profit.

I know a lot of other people have similar feels. I just want to encourage people to think beyond parliamentary politics and imagine possibilities outside of the settler colonial state, outside of capitalism and outside of oppressive social relations.

Neo-liberalism and single-issue politics has created a proliferation
of different interest groups that work on their own issues - NGOs and
grassroots groups here and there that work on specific issues and
campaigns, often siloed with few connections to groups working on
seemingly separate problems.

There are people/groups
that focus on anti-poverty, prisoners' rights, environmental issues,
animal rights, university/student-based issues, housing/gentrification,
union organising, decolonisation, tino rangatiratanga, queer liberation, gender-based
violence, sex worker rights and other feminist issues. There are already
some overlaps between these movements, but mostly through the people
involved rather than different groups directly working together. Imagine if we got
everyone in one space, everyone who is in some form of other involved in
grassroots movements of radical resistance, and we focused our energy on
taking direct action, empowering our communities to not only fight back
and react to National's cuts and attacks but to create models of human
existence without all the oppressive bullshit.

About this blog

This is a blog dedicated to radical social change from a section of the "Asian" tau iwi population in Aotearoa. We wish to create more dialogue and space to talk about issues that are specific to our experience. It’s about opening up a space in which Asian feminists in Aotearoa can speak and communicate our specific and diverse experiences, to counter the dominant white feminisms and left-wing politics, to challenge colonialism, racism, sexism and all forms of unjust social hierarchy. To engage in decolonisation, to create understanding between all oppressed people, to support each other, to inspire solidarity and organize collectively for a better world.